


Migraine

by irlmagicalgirl



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Comfort, Cuddles, F/M, Fluff, Headaches & Migraines, Love, Pain, Sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-16
Updated: 2015-09-16
Packaged: 2018-04-21 01:49:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4810313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irlmagicalgirl/pseuds/irlmagicalgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Commander Shepard is prone to crippling migraines, and the only cure is sleep. And maybe turian assistance.</p><p>Takes place during Mass Effect 2 time period.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Migraine

  
It will not let me sleep, I guess I'll sleep when I'm dead,  
And sometimes death seems better than the migraine in my head  
...  
And I will say that we should take a day to break away,  
From all the pain our brain has made,  
The game is not played alone.  
And I will say that we should take a moment and hold it,  
And keep it frozen and know that,  
Life has a hopeful undertone.  
\- Migraine, 21 Pilots

* * *

 

 

            "Nice to have a night off, don't you think?"

            Shepard stretched her still fairly new spine, ever conscious of  good posture, as she sat next to Joker in the Normandy's just-as-new leather seats. The cockpit was deceptively one of the most comfortable areas of the ship, and besides its new upholstery, its cool darkness and glowing buttons and screens offered a kind of serene comfort.

            "It is, really," he replied to her. "It's kind of nice to idle a little without worrying about landing, oh, I don't know, in the middle of some damn zombie colonists or something like that."

            Shepard smirked at him. "Keeps you on your toes though, doesn't it?"

            "I'd prefer to stay off my toes, thanks, in most manners of speaking. But really, even if we were docked somewhere that wasn't a death threat, I prefer cruising anyway. It just _feels_ better. Especially with the new improvements. I mean, don't get me wrong - the old Normandy is always going to have a place in my heart, but the _new_ Normandy...I can feel her _purr_ , Shep. Really. Like she's speaking to me."

            Shepard smiled at him as he ran a loving hand over the dash.

            "Speaking to you? I take it EDI's growing on you then?"

                        "Oh. _That._ Well...Not exactly, no. I was referring to the machinery that speaks to me. The part that _literally_ speaks..."

                        "You still don't see eye to eye?"

                        "I guess I'm starting to trust it - her - a little more, but damn, I miss being in control. It's like having a _really_ good backseat driver. Too good. Practically has her hands on the controls herself. Not to mention she knows _everything_. It's almost demeaning. "

                        On cue, the blue orb to Joker's left lit up.

                        "You called for me, Shepard?"  asked EDI's cool voice.

                        "Goddamn it, you said her name, Shep," Joker muttered.

                        "I apologize for the late response. I thought it would be most polite to wait until Mr. Moreau was finished talking about me." There was a nearly detectable trace of snark in her synthetic voice.

                        "No, thank you, EDI. Joker's just worried that you're doing his job better than he is, that's all."

                        "I see. I was told I might give someone an inferiority complex."

                        "You were?" Shepard asked over Joker yelling that he, in fact, did _not_ have an inferiority complex.

                        "No. But I might as well have been. VI's have a tendency to do that."

                        "Ugh, I do _not_ have an inferiority complex! Where's your Go-Away button?"

                        "Please, Mr. Moreau, I was only having fun. "

                        "Yeah, _Mr. Moreau_ ," Shepard repeated. "EDI was just having fun."

                        Fun that had started to trigger a dull ache just behind Shepard's ears, but she prayed it was just a result of sudden loud bickering and that it would fade away, rather than what she knew it _really_ was.

                        "Here, I think it's this," said Joker as he pressed something on the dash.

                        "You have pressed the Normandy Statistics button," EDI started.

                        "Goddamn it, that's not a thing, stop screwing with me!"

                        "Normandy air pressure - stable."

                        "I _know_ it's stable, I can see the meter right here, EDI, please!"

                        "The Normandy is travelling at a rate of -"

                        " _God damn,_ I _know_ the rate we're travelling at!"

                        As their arguing escalated, so did the ache in Shepard's head. The pain travelled from behind her ears to the nape of her neck, back around to the top of her head, and began to seep into each crevice of her face. The pain behind her eyes and in her cheeks was painfully reminiscent of the allergy headaches she got on Earth, but worse. The dull ache had turned into a very steady throb, everywhere from the neck up, and she let out a small groan that she had intended to keep internal.

                        The noise was apparently loud enough to interrupt EDI and Joker,  and reveal that EDI's Normandy Statistics _were_ just another joke.

                        "Is something the matter, Shepard?" asked EDI, who was always surprisingly more in tune to emotion and pain than anyone expected for a VI.

                        Joker turned his chair to see her no longer posture-conscious, her head resting in her heads.

                        "You alright, Commander?"

                        "We have annoyed her, Mr. Moreau," EDI assessed.

                        "Nah, that's not it. It's another migraine, huh?"

                        It took all of her strength just to nod once, and as she did, it felt as if every nerve in her head was being shaken out.

                        "Damn, I'm sorry, Commander," apologized Joker. Shepard would have explained that the migraines often came unannounced and that the arguing likely didn't trigger it, but speaking would have taken too much effort. "She has chronic migraines, EDI. Was that not listed in your Normandy Statistics? It's when her head hurts too bad to function, but I guess someone that didn't _have_ a head wouldn't understand that."

                        "Believe it or not, Mr. Moreau, I understand what a migraine is. I was simply uninformed that Commander Shepard was prone. I believe it would be best for her that we stop speaking now."

                        Shepard thanked the VI silently and rested her softly on the leather head rest. Unfortunately, she was too short, and her head hit just where the head rest met the top of the seat. Besides that, the upright position was doing her no favors, and suddenly the buttons and monitors covering the control panel were no longer comforting.

                        Not a minute had passed before Joker suggested that she head to her quarters to rest. Shepard generally, and very stubbornly, insisted that she could wait out the migraines in the open and in the presence of others, but the fact of the matter was that the only thing that ever got them to go away completely was sleep. She nodded slowly once more and very gingerly stood up.

                        "Let me know if you need anything at all, Commander Shepard," EDI offered quietly.

                        Shepard braced herself for the first step, which always seemed to be the worst. Walking at all was the worst feeling thing to do with a migraine, other than eye movement, but that first step was crippling and would all but buckle your knees.

                        She always thought of the story of The Little Mermaid, the old Hans Christian Anderson version, that she had read over and over again, once upon a time in her youth in an ancient library. It was strange and tragic, and she always felt especially bad about the fact that each of the mermaid's human steps felt like a dagger through her foot. That always seemed to be the worst part - even worse than the mermaid not being able to speak. Nevertheless, it was also the silver lining of walking with a migraine, because it was especially easy to pretend to be the little mermaid when you, too, felt daggers when you walked.

                        Normally when walking through the Normandy, or anywhere for that matter, Shepard was exceptionally aware of her posture and manner of walking. She was tiny, even just as a person, besides being the smallest member of her own crew. Everyone knew her strength - it wasn't exactly a secret - and her muscle mass made up the majority of her weight. No one on the Normandy was going to disrespect her, especially not for her size, but habit was habit. For the first half of her life, particularly in her gang days, Shepard felt she needed to make herself appear as big as possible to be taken seriously. Now, this translated to the constant habit of adjusting her shoulders and making sure her back was always straight, and she always seemed to walk like she had a tall stack of books on her head, the often serious expression on her face telling everyone that she didn't intend for any of them to fall.

                        All of this was forgotten when a migraine was in play. When each step was excruciating, it was too difficult to bother making them graceful and strong as well. Keeping her head up was just as bad, especially while walking through particularly lit areas of the ship. No one she passed asked her if she was alright; they all knew the drill by now and, unlike EDI, they had all quickly learned how prone their commander was to migraines. Nothing crippled her quite the way they did - she was still graceful when dealing with stress or battle. As the crew watched their commander taking slow steps to her quarters, head down and eyes all but closed, they did nothing but make sure they were well out of her way.

                        Just the idea of her bed was beginning to help once she stepped into her room. She wondered if she should leave a note outside the door, but she figured it probably wouldn't be necessary, nor would it be worth the struggle. She still managed to put a pen back in its place on her immaculate desk, shut off the main light, and carefully crawl onto her bed. It was a vast improvement from her chair in the cockpit, regardless of the new upholstery.

                        Often, Shepard would be too tired to bother dressing for bed, and on this particular occasion, she might have been too much in pain. The migraine was beginning to effect her entire body however, even if it literally was all in her head, and the unbearable feeling of clothing on her skin trumped the struggle it was to remove them.

                        She stripped to her underwear, and while her head felt the same, the removal of her clothes helped exponentially. The welcoming pillow embraced her head and her cool duvet wrapped her like a silver mist. Pain was still pain, but when you felt like you were dying, it was at least a little nicer to die in comfort.

                        The dim blue glow of her aquarium had a different effect on her and her headache than the lights in the cockpit. It was constant and not so bright. Just a comforting blue glow without a voice. She was thankful that, for the time being, the aquarium was actually void of fish - nothing was swimming around to cause her eyes to dart back and forth with sharp pain. Just water, moving almost unnoticeably, singing her a silent lullaby.

                        The pangs of Shepard's headache still came rhythmically. She could feel them in her eyes, her cheeks, deep in her ears, and on the roof of her mouth. They were no longer dull and constant. Instead, each pang was hard and sharp, and the wait between each pang was just as bad, full of anticipation for the next blow. A single tear rolled down her cheek, and she let her eyelids fall, leaving them just open enough to keep her eyes on the calm, blue water. Besides, her eyelashes hurt too much to let them touch.

                        At one time, Shepard felt strange crying from her migraines. After all, she did almost every time they came. She had been hit with more varieties of ammo than many people even knew existed, and yet, she was still debilitated by something so internal. The pain of a migraine, she came to accept, was just _different_. She wasn't crying to relieve pain, like she had when she suffered her worst leg injury. The tears fell because she couldn't help it. They fell before she had a chance to realize or think about them appearing. It was as if the pangs behind her eyes were forcing them out. She realized, every time she got a worse-than-usual injury, that she could still walk tall through that pain. She could hardly stand up at all with a migraine. She thought that was deserving of at least one tear.

                        She wanted to sleep more than anything in the world at that moment, especially knowing that sleep was her only chance at relief, but she couldn't bring herself too. The aquarium was tempting her, but was not quite distracting enough, and the feeling of her eyelids touching her waterline was still too painful to be able to close her eyes long enough.  At least one of the tears that fell was in mourning for her lack of sleep.

                        Just as she was about to turn over and start the journey to sleep from scratch, the door to her room opened, light seeping in around a large silhouette. Shepard attempted to sit up, resting herself on one elbow and shielding her eyes with the opposite hand. Whoever was interrupting her  was either urgent, or had not seen her walk of shame to know that she was hiding in pain. She deciphered quickly who her visitor was, knowing that he had _not_ seen her walking to her room and _hoping_ that he was not urgent.

                        "Garrus?" she whispered, her voice raspy from not having spoken in a while.

                        His head swiveled up at her. "Ah, Shepard. I just...I left some of my notes last time I was in here. You haven't - ?"

                        With a hand still shielding her wincing eyes from the light pouring in through the open door, she pointed to the top corner of the room, near her hamster's cage, where she had wedged Garrus's left behind notes.

                        "Wonderful, thank you, ah - you aren't feeling well?" he asked, turning towards her. "Another headache?"

                        Shepard blinked painfully in response with a hardly detectable nod of her head.

                        "I'm sorry," he said much more quietly and turned you walk out.

                        "You can stay," Shepard whispered. "Please."

                        He turned back around, placing his notes on her desk and hoping that he wouldn't forget them again.

                        "The door."

                        He understood that it hurt too much to make the sentence any longer and that he had caused the light that had been disturbing her. He shut the door behind him and found his way to the unoccupied side of her bed in dark, letting the aquarium's aqua glow light his feet. He began to apologize for disturbing her, and for leaving the door open so long, and for making her speak, and for not knowing she was having another migraine in the first place, speaking as quietly as he could manage. So quietly, his translators didn't even pick him up.      

                        The nearly inaudible noises that came from Garrus's mouth were, in Shepard's opinion, and for lack of a more appropriate term, alien. They were some conglomeration of a cat's purr, a bird's coo, and a reptilian hiss. She had heard turian speech sans translation only very few times before, but never so gently and never so quietly. Never Garrus. It was a strange and completely indescribable sound, and paired with the background noise of the aquarium's bubbling filter, it sent a chill up her spine to combat the pain in her head.

                        "I'm sorry," she said, a pang for each word. "Translator didn't pick you up." Black specks of pain flashed as she blinked, but she didn't mind them in exchange for the chance to ask Garrus to continue mumbling.

                        "Oh," he said just loudly enough. "I was just apologizing..."

                        "Don't have to," Shepard replied. She now kept her eyes shut, despite the ache in her eyelids, desperate to cancel out all darkness and movement. "Can you...speak quiet again?"      

                        "Hm?"

                        "Your...real voice," she spoke slowly. "I...like it. Feels good."

                        "What should I say?"

                        Shepard shook her head gently against his chest as if to say that it didn't matter.

                        He sat up straighter in the bed and began to speak again, without his translator picking him  up. She couldn't explain what it was about the indecipherable noises that soothed her, but it had the same effect as rain hitting a window or someone singing her to sleep so quietly and so in between the space of dreaming and reality that it was impossible to decipher the lyrics. She didn't bother trying to guess what it was that Garrus was saying - that defeated the purpose in a way. It was nice, for one, not to be thinking at all and just concentrate on getting the headache to stop. Also, the fact that she could not make out what he was saying was half the help. She didn't have to concentrate on individual words to process, or bother replying. It was sound for the sake of sound, but gentle and perfect, and though she could not explain what it was that she liked so much about it, it gave her goose bumps across her arms the same way good music did.

                        Laying down allowed for her to be dead even with Garrus's lap and she nestled her head in a crook of his body, using her pillow for support. He continued to mumble to her as his fingers stroked across her hair line. Each follicle hurt, but as he ran her fingers through her hair further, she discovered that it was a pleasurable hurt, like rubbing out a kink in your back.

                        His voice turned out to be even more effective than her aquarium as it seemed to actually fight against the migraine. It was still there, but finally, she had something that distracted her just enough without making the pain worse. It wasn't long before she could no long tell if the turian's mumbles were really happening or just in her head.

                        She woke up hours later, headache gone entirely, having slept through the whole night. She felt cool, gliding movement in her hair and realized that she was still in Garrus's lap, and his fingers were still in her hair.

                        "You're still here?" she murmured, surprised.

                        "Sleep well?" he asked, back to his regular volume.

                        "Fantastic. Did you sleep at all?"

                        "A little. I don't need much."

                        "I'm sorry I kept you here."

                        "Shepard, it's my pleasure, always."

                        She smiled at him softly. "You realize we have a terrible problem now, don't you?"

                        "Just what we need. What is it this time?"

                        "You can never leave my bedroom now."

                        "Not that I'm arguing, Shepard, but why not?"

                        "Well, I can't have my personal sleep machine getting away from me now, can I?"

                        She raised her head to smirk at him as he pressed his mouth to her no-longer-throbbing forehead.

                        "Thank you, Garrus. Really."

                        He stroked her hair again in response and held her tiny frame closer to his body.

                        "Commander Shepard, are you better this morning?" came EDI's voice over her room's speaker. "Do you have any orders?"

                        Shepard opened her mouth to respond but Garrus beat her to it.

                        "She's fine, EDI, thank you."

                        EDI paused noticeable after his reply. "...Yes, Garrus. My apologies."

                        Shepard raised her eyebrows at him.

                        "What? The crew's going to find out about whatever's going on between us sooner or later. Might as well be sooner."

                        She continued to stare at him, her smile growing.

                        "What's that look for?"

                        "I love you, Garrus."

                        He stared back at her, awed, and blinked a few times, before responding impossibly quietly again, his turian voice chilling Shepard.

                        "I-I'm sorry, what was that?" she asked, flustered. He laughed softly at her.

                        "I love you, too, Shepard."

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on my own Shepard, who I relate to on crazy levels. Her migraines, size, posture quirk, and extreme neatness (which only has a brief mention) are all taken from myself. Um......idk but my Shepard is probably cooler than me.  
> Also I almost put in my Shep's first name, which is Jenica, which is the Romanian form of Jane (really convenient actually - I didn't know it was a translation of Jane until AFTER I named her. Jenica's been kind of an important name to me since I was like 12....idk there's a whole reason behind her being Romanian, but whatever. I just think it's funny that she's still named Jane even though she's not) bUT I figured leaving out her first name made this more ~accessible~ and what have you.  
> Um. That's all.  
> OH! Also....I guess this takes place during ME2, bc EDI has no body and shit hasnt gotten EXTREMELY desperate yet and also probably Garrus and Shep haven't banged yet....but Idk I just wanted to do whatever the fuck with their relationship bc lol I dont care. That WAS their first 'i love you' at the end though if that wasnt clear. This wasnt even gunna be a ship fic at first, it was just gunna be a drabble about how my Shep gets migraines and its the only thing that ruins her bad posture, but clearly shit escalated....  
> okay im through here. sorry.


End file.
